


If You Could Let Me Inside Your Heart

by Poetry



Category: Leverage
Genre: 5+1 Things, Alternate Universe - Psychics/Psionics, Character Study, Episode: S04e07 The Grave Danger Job, Episode: s01e10 The 12-Step Job, Episode: s02e13 The Future Job, Gen, Hardison's robot army, Mind Meld, Podfic Available, Pre-OT3, Star Wars References
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-01-11
Updated: 2016-01-11
Packaged: 2018-05-13 07:01:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5699293
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Poetry/pseuds/Poetry
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Five times Hardison tried to read his teammates’ minds, and one time he didn’t have to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	If You Could Let Me Inside Your Heart

**Author's Note:**

> A bunch of people commented on my [Sense8/Leverage crossover](http://archiveofourown.org/works/5485808) wondering what it would be like if the Leverage team were psychic. This fic is the result. (Content note for, well, the Grave Danger Job tag.)
> 
> Thanks to [Hearth and Home](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2696900) by lady_ragnell for influencing my Eliot characterization here, and also to [wiseabsol](http://archiveofourown.org/users/wiseabsol) for the beta read, which improved this story noticeably.

**1.**  
  
When Hardison meets up with the famous Nathan Ford outside the Pierson Aviation building, he reaches out with his thoughts and tests his mental shields right away. He won’t work with the guy if he doesn’t have telepathic training like a proper thief.  
  
Ford’s mindscape is an endless chessboard. But no, it’s more than that. It’s a many-layered labyrinth, checkered, full of chess pieces in five different colors. Thorny vines grow all over the labyrinth walls; Hardison sees one vine wrapped around a knight’s neck, its horse eyes rolling back. Just looking at all of it makes Hardison’s head spin. If he enters that maze, he ain’t coming out.  
  
Good. Ford was an insurance man recovering stolen property, after all. Even if he isn’t a thief, he learned to think like one.  
  
At the edges of his awareness, Hardison feels Parker and Spencer testing out Ford, too, wild bright eyes and shadowed distant eyes, respectively. Parker seems to follow the philosophy that the best mental defense is a good offense; her mental presence is made of the hisses and caws and roars of a horde of wild animals. Spencer sends out no mental probes Hardison can see; he’s bricked up so tight that all Hardison feels from him is a distant warmth.  
  
Ford raises his eyebrows at Hardison. _You nerd_ , Ford wants to say. Hardison can feel it. It’s what most people say when they take a look at his mindscape.  
  
They all exchange looks. They nod, satisfied with their internal defenses. He, Parker, and Spencer walk toward the Pierson building. Ford walks the opposite way.  
  


**2.**  
  
It takes Hardison a while to figure out Sophie’s mindscape. When they first meet after her awful show, it’s all high walls and fairy-tale castles. But the next time Hardison checks out her mind, while she’s on a grift, it’s a tangle of highways twisting into overpasses and quadruple roundabouts. In fact, her mindscape is different every time he looks at it.  
  
“That’s impossible,” he bursts out one day. “Your mindscape has to be consistent or it won’t work!”  
  
Sophie smiles. “It _is_ consistent, Hardison. You’ve just got to look harder.”  
  
He does. It gets to be a little obsessive, but Hardison’s always like that when he’s going after a problem he can’t solve. Over time, he notices that the pieces of her mindscape are just a little flat, and there’s shadows around the edges of each scene.  
  
_Scene._ “They’re set pieces!” he says suddenly while they’re all going over the map of a building together.  
  
“Bingo,” says Nate.  
  
“Huh?” says Parker.  
  
“Her mindscape,” Hardison says, pointing at Sophie, “is a _stage_. It _is_ consistent. All the different shields she puts up are just set pieces.” He looks at the edge of the set, a tall skyscraper fading off into indistinct cityscape, and sees a signature, like one left by a stage designer to show it’s her work, but it’s a elegant scribble he can’t read anything into.  
  
Eliot raises his eyebrows at Sophie. “Huh. That’s good.”  
  
“I know I am,” says Sophie, who laughs darkly and puts on a new play behind her eyes.  
  


**3.**  
  
When Parker comes out of the rehab center, the horde of beasts in her mind is kind of _tame_ all of a sudden.  
  
Hardison sends a thought to Nate: _Did you notice…?_ which disappears into his labyrinth. After a while in rehab without alcohol, the vines growing on the labyrinth walls are trimmed back. Nate’s mindscape looks nicer, less dangerous. Beneath the trimmed vines Hardison sees writing on the labyrinth walls, all in Latin, maybe prayers.  
  
Nate sends back: _Yeah. It’s the meds they put her on. She’ll adjust._  
  
Then Parker pulls him and Eliot into a three-way hug. The contact opens her mind to him a little more. He can see an endless park full of frolicking wild beasts, clever-fingered monkeys tending to the wounded – damn, he hopes Parker’s as okay as she looks on the outside – and not a cage in sight.  
  
Oh, he should not be doing this, looking around in here. He’s taking advantage. But she looks so happy he can’t make himself tell her that she’s not in her right mind. And Eliot’s not pulling away either.  
  
Their hands touch along Parker’s shoulders, and in the fortress of Eliot’s mind Hardison sees a door standing slightly open. Hardison takes in the heat and crackle of a fire burning in a fireplace somewhere, the delicious smell of something baking. He wants to throw open the door and step inside. But Eliot would never let him, so he just enjoys the smell of woodsmoke and brown sugar from Eliot’s mind and the contented purrs and chirps from Parker’s.  
  
Parker pulls them along toward the car. “Hey,” she says to Eliot. “Wanna try to teach us how to spar again?”  
  
Hardison gets it. Eliot tried to teach them, once, and neither he nor Parker could get the punches right. But now that they have this connection open between them, as thin of a thread as it is, they’ll be more in sync. Already Hardison can feel that Parker’s heart is beating steady and Eliot’s suddenly fast.  
  
“Sure,” Eliot says, a flicker of the heat inside of his mind washing over Hardison. “My gym or yours?”  
  


**4.**  
  
Since Parker was cold-read by that two-bit huckster, her close-guarded secrets bleeding out of her in front of everyone, the beasts patrolling her borders have snarled and put their hackles up whenever Hardison so much as looks sideways at her mind.  
  
He sends the curl of a question mark floating down his connection to Eliot. He gets the solid feel of a head nodding in return. She’s cut her connection to him, too.  
  
The next job, Hardison sneaks through the mark’s office building with Parker and realizes he feels wrong-footed, like he’s suddenly dancing without a partner. They’re on the roof and Parker is about to jump, and even though he reaches for it, he can’t feel her heart hammering with anticipation.  
  
“Good hunting, Parker,” Hardison says, reaching out with his voice instead. “May the Force be with you.”  
  
Parker grips her rope and frowns. “What force?” she says, then jumps over the edge.  
  
“Did you hear that?” Hardison says to Eliot over the comms. “Parker’s never even heard of Star Wars!”  
  
“I’m sure you’re gonna fix that real quick,” Eliot says drily.  
  
“Dude, I am going to fix that _tonight_.”  
  
So now she and Eliot are at Hardison’s place, watching _A New Hope_. When R2-D2 comes on screen, Parker turns to Hardison and says, “You have that one in your robot army.”  
  
Hardison smiles, pauses the movie, and sends one of his mental constructs of R2 rolling toward her mind. “Yeah. I got R2-D2, K-9 from _Doctor Who_ , the Companion Cube and the turrets from _Portal_ – ” He sees Eliot glaring at him and finishes, “and some other ones too. But mostly I make them up myself.”  
  
A tiger patrolling the borders of Parker’s mind sniffs Hardison’s R2-D2 construct. Then it starts purring and licks at R2 like a friendly dog. Hardison can feel the edges of Parker’s mind again.  
  
Eliot hits play on the remote and nudges Parker with his shoulder. Up on the ramparts of his fortress, too high and shadowed to see any detail, there are watchers on the walls, looking down on Parker’s mindscape protectively. “C’mon. Don’t you wanna know what happens to Luke?”  
  
“Luke’s whiny,” Parker says, grabbing the popcorn bowl. “I want to know what happens to the robot.”  
  


**5.**  
  
When Javier hangs up the phone, three things happen.  
  
First, the coffin squeezes in around Hardison. The walls start coming in closer. It’s going to close in until he’s vacuum-sealed. No, no, that’s not how coffins work, he thinks. This is all in your head, Alec.  
  
Second, he does something he’s never done before, not since he first started training his mind. He powers down his force fields, puts down every wrench and power converter, and turns all the robots loose from his workshop, sending them out in every direction. _Find them_ , he tells his constructs. _They have to be out there somewhere._  
  
Third, he dials Parker’s number from memory.  
  
His range isn’t for enough for them to know where he is. Parker can’t feel him, no matter how hard he tries to reach out for her. He strains his mind so hard he nearly stops breathing, until Parker talks him out of it. “Tell me if you hear anything,” she says, “and I’ll tell you if I feel you.”  
  
He hears the ambulance siren. _They’re coming, they’re coming._ Then he feels her. One of her crocodiles runs straight into R2-D2, who starts beeping and whistling with everything it’s got. Hardison can feel Parker’s heart hammering. Her beasts follow Hardison’s robots and she gets closer and closer. Behind her, he can feel Sophie, her stage set up like a dark forest with spotlights searching through it. Then there’s Nate’s labyrinth, Eliot’s strong fortress with the smell of woodsmoke and olive oil wafting from the chimney, and the harsh chrome-swept edges of Javier’s mind, like a fancy sports car gone feral and hungry. The man who trapped him here. The man who’s firing a gun at his team, somewhere above his head.  
  
He’s running out of air. He can’t keep this up. His robots come back to the workshop, all of them except R2, who stays with Parker’s crocodile. R2 and Parker’s voice are his only connection to the world of light and openness and _air_. God, his lungs hurt so _much_.  
  
“You have to make it through this,” Parker says. The crocodile wraps its tail around R2. “Because… because you’re my friend, and I need you. Do you hear me, Alec? I need you!”  
  
She fires at the coffin, and there’s _air_ , and Eliot’s pulling him out, the door to his fortress wide open like he’s never seen it before, bathing him in light and warmth as he crushes Hardison into a hug.  
  
He hugs Nate, and Sophie, and over her shoulder he can see that Parker can’t handle this, not yet, not like this. But every one of his robots has a beast patrolling next to it, eyes protective and fierce, and Hardison takes in the smells of Parker’s fur and hot breath, and Eliot’s cooking and the hearth-fire, and feels like he really might be safe now.  
  


**+1.**  
  
The next day, Hardison gets a call from Eliot, inviting him over for dinner. “No pressure, man,” he says. “But I’m making pot roast and Parker’s coming over for sure. Be nice to have you.”  
  
The pot roast is amazing, just like everything Eliot cooks. The connection between them is wider than before. Groups of wolves and lions wander around and bat playfully at Hardison’s bots, which beep and flash back at them, all while firelight and the smell of fresh-baked brownies washes over them from the open door of Eliot’s fortress. They don’t talk about yesterday, but Parker’s beasts patrol with the bots, and from the ramparts of Eliot’s fortress, Hardison can feel dark watchful eyes on his mind.  
  
Parker drops her fork suddenly, points at Hardison, and says, “Parker 2000.”  
  
“What about her?”  
  
“She’s in your robot army.”  
  
“Well, yeah. I made her in my head first, then I made her for real.”  
  
Parker claps her hand to her forehead. “Oh. Oh! This is why Sophie used to look at me like I was stupid, even though I’m not stupid, isn’t it?”  
  
Hardison trades a look with Eliot. He doesn’t know what to say to that, so he just goes with, “Sophie doesn’t think you’re stupid, Parker.”  
  
“But I missed it!” Parker says. “You shield yourself with a robot army, so you made me a robot.” She looks at Eliot. “And you have a warm cozy kitchen in your head, so you invited us over and made us food.”  
  
Hardison hadn’t really thought about it like that. Eliot’s heart starts beating a little faster, though his face barely changes.  
  
“I can’t give you any of my animals. They’re too dangerous.” Parker smiles and reaches for their hands over the table. “But I can give you this.”  
  
Eliot starts a little, but he doesn’t pull his hand away from hers. Hardison just grabs on. And her mind opens up.  
  
The beasts stop patrolling the borders. The crocodiles bask on the banks of fast-flowing rivers. The wolves chase each other and howl. Snakes slither into their dens. Flocks of ravens settle in the trees and feed each other berries. A lion curls up with a hyena and falls asleep. Hardison can see the whole park, horizon to horizon, and at the center is her anchor: a little huddle of rabbits, the only harmless animals in her whole mindscape, with a family of polar bears standing guard around them, keeping the bunnies safe.  
  
Hardison’s never seen a whole other mind like that. It’s beautiful. Eliot thinks so too, he knows. And both of them open up their minds, too.  
  
A pride of lions wanders into his workshop, sniffing at the smears of motor oil on the floor and the nozzles of the blowtorches, until they make it to his anchor, his first gift ever: an old Macintosh his Nana bought him for his eleventh birthday. The watchers on the walls of Eliot’s fortress – the shadows fallen away from them, so Hardison can see they’re his old army buddies – look down at the park and the workshop spread out beneath them.  
  
WALL-E, Tom Servo, and a flock of bats come in through the front door of the fortress. There’s a foyer, and to the right a door that opens on a kitchen. French onion soup and mashed potatoes cook on the burners, and a rack of venison roasts in the oven. Straight ahead, another door is open, this one on a rustic living room centered around a fire in a huge stone hearth. The room pulls him forward with the weight of an anchor. On the wall, Hardison sees an old U.S. cavalry saber, and a picture of what has to be a younger Eliot with his family. WALL-E stands in front of the picture and blinks, overwhelmed. This has to be a copy of the house where Eliot grew up.  
  
Hardison opens his eyes and suddenly remembers that his body ends at his hands, that there’s skin separating him from Parker and Eliot. His hand and Eliot’s had linked at some point, and between the three of them, their arms make a triangle over Eliot’s round kitchen table. It doesn’t seem right that there’s so much space between them.  
  
Hardison closes his eyes and smells hot beef stew and woodsmoke in his workshop, sees a bot following a fox into its hole, and watches K-9 and a coyote curl together on the rug in front of the hearth. He squeezes Parker’s and Eliot’s hands. They’ve put their minds together, and they fit perfectly. The rest will come together in time. 

**Works inspired by this one:**

  * [[Podfic of] If You Could Let Me Inside Your Heart](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13101273) by [knight_tracer](https://archiveofourown.org/users/knight_tracer/pseuds/knight_tracer)




End file.
